Hoffman with Leo Woodall in Tuner[Missing Credit]
Woodall cracking a safe in the film[Missing Credit]
Roher was inspired to create the film after befriending a real-life piano tuner. “I was so inspired by the way he talked about his own work. He’s talking about atrophy and entropy and the forces of the universe that want to pull a piano out of tune. It’s his job to restore order where the universe wants there to be chaos. And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really incredible.’ It’s just a very deep vocation. And I thought that his itinerant thing of going from mansion to mansion was really interesting.”
Of course, any crime film with Hoffman in will make you think of 1978’s Straight Time, one of the actor’s most masterly movies. “It’s a deeper cut from his catalogue, I’d say. But a beautiful film,” says Roher, who wrote the role of Harry with Hoffman in mind. Before sending him the script, he was nervous, unsure how the 88-year-old would respond. But the idea of playing a character reaching the end of the line tantalised Hoffman, which was utterly thrilling. “You get a lot of rejection, a lot of passes [in this business]. So to get something like that from a guy, a living legend, is really, really empowering.”
With the use of sound so crucial in the film, Roher studied movies such as The Conversation, Blow Out and Sound of Metal. In the film, Woodall’s Niki suffer from hyperacusis, a rare but debilitating condition. “Anytime you hear a loud, sharp sound, it’s actually painful,” explains Roher, who spoke to several people who suffer this “very alienating” ailment in a world where noise is everywhere. “It’s really a film about a disability,” he says. “It’s a story about someone who is profoundly disabled in a way, who’s trying to deal with it, and reconcile the loss that comes with that.”
While Tuner shows that Roher has an ear for characters and drama, he has already returned to documentary film-making with The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Co-directed with Charlie Tyrell, it’s a deep dive into artificial intelligence – a world away from piano tuners and safe-crackers. In his eyes, AI is coming and whatever field we work in, we should be concerned. “This is something that will impact every single one of us in ways that are profound and very intense,” he says.
Curiously, the subject comes up when I ask Roher how strongly he identifies with his Jewish roots. “It’s a big part of my life, I would say,” he replies. “As I’m having more existential anxiety surrounding AI, I’m finding myself leaning more into my Judaism as I never have before. I’m sensing tectonic shifts in the ground and the world under my feet, and I’m really embracing a 5,000-year-old tradition that has been unchanged as a mechanism for stability and guidance in a time that is so transformative and scary.”
With the film featuring interviews with pioneering computer scientists Ilya Sutskever and Deborah Raji, “the men and women who are birthing this thing into life, changing all our lives”, the film sparked a huge debate in Roher’s own mind. “I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the implications of that for me and my family in the world. And so I only invoke that to speak to the Jewishness of life. I’m finding comfort in this…[something] that has endured and survived through cataclysm.”
If his faith has given him stability at a time of great change, he senses that many of us are sleepwalking into an AI nightmare. “If everybody understood what was happening, then there would be 10,000 people in Trafalgar Square advocating for international collaboration and coordination… I would say global collaboration is what the world needs. What I would advocate for is an organisation, maybe inspired by the United Nations, that basically governs how AI is built and deployed.” A man who has his ear to the ground, you might say.
Dustin Hoffman: ‘I learnt a lot about pianos’
When two-time Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman first read the Tuner script, he was immensely impressed, writes Susan Hornik.
Hoffman, who plays veteran tuner Harry Horowitz, a Jewish man well-versed in fixing pianos, actually plays piano in real life.
“Somehow Daniel knew that (in real life) I played the piano,” the seven-time Academy Award nominee told the audience after a private screening at Black Bear Pictures in Los Angeles.
“Daniel sent me a script, and I liked it very much. I told him it was very well written… I was in Europe, and he flew over on his own dime, and we just talked… What particularly struck me was the original way the story evolved into a heist genre; it felt fresh and compelling.”
Hoffman said he was “shocked” because he had never met anyone like Roher before, who had worked on many layers of the film.
“He did everything, I don’t know if I have ever seen that before. He’d never made a (fictional) film, he’d never written a (dramatic script) screenplay. He did everything – he wrote the script, cast the characters himself, he learnt about piano tuners, and he actually hung out with them and learnt so much about them.
“I was appreciative of how open he was in allowing me to improvise... Daniel ‘just let me go’. He genuinely likes actors, and he was very open to improvisation, which I love.”
Before he became an iconic actor, performing in legendary roles in films such as The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy, Hoffman attended the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music with the dream of becoming a concert pianist.
“The role of a piano tuner immediately resonated with me on a personal level,” he said.
“Having spent my life playing piano and taking lessons early on from teachers who were also piano tuners, I’d become aware of how these craftsmen are often quite accomplished pianists themselves, yet remain under-appreciated… I found it ironic that they couldn’t make a living doing what they loved.”
Even with all his piano-playing experience, Hoffman learnt another valuable lesson, after talking to the tuners who Roher had consulted for the film.
“I found out that while I had played piano all my life, and I didn’t know certain things… one (tuner) guy said to me, ‘Every piano is different.’ Some of this is in the film. And he said, ‘A piano has a soul.’ I had never heard that before.”
Broadway and film star Tovah Feldshuh plays Harry’s wife, the moral compass of the film.
“You know how I got this movie? They called me – one call – and said, ‘Do you want to be Dustin Hoffman’s wife?’ I didn’t even need to read the script, I took the role!”
Tuner is in cinemas from today. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist premieres at the Sheffield Docfest on June 12 and is in cinemas from June 19
